I spent a year working at WordPress.com to learn their secrets. Surprisingly they were happy about this: They granted permission, before I was hired, to write a book about my experience. That book, called “The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and The Future of Work,” launches today. It follows my amazing year as one of the first managers in the history of Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com. It’s a fascinating story for anyone who reads anything online, as nearly 20 percent of the Web runs on WordPress software, including PandoDaily. PD was kind enough to let me share some of the insights from the book with you.

1. Workers should be treated like adults.

A recent Gallup Poll of American workers found that 70 percent of workers aren’t engaged at work. This is a disaster. It means three of four of you reading this (at least in the US) have jobs you do not care for. And the reasons you don’t care are reasonable: Most employees are treated like children. Bureaucracies, rulebooks, protocols and processes all presume that the rule maker has the hard job, but we know that’s rarely true.

At WordPress.com team managers see their jobs as facilitators, not dictators. People are hired for their talents and the job of management is to stay out of talent’s way and guide it when needed.

2. Your location matters less than your output.

All 170 employees at Automattic work from anywhere in the world they wish. They’re in more than 40 countries and nearly ever time zone. Some people join the company and then travel the world while working. This fact typically blows people’s minds, but it shouldn’t. The typical office worker spends much of their time interacting with coworkers via email, the Web and the phone. It’s mostly mediated through screens and machines. If that’s the case, why does location matter?

We complain about how painfully stupid most in person meetings are, yet we oddly resist their elimination. Provided the results are great, why should anyone care where someone works from? They shouldn’t.

3. You can escape from email hell.

In the 18 months I worked on WordPress.com, most email I sent or received was to people outside the company. Because employees are treated like adults, there’s less of the grandstanding and approval-seeking that clogs many email inboxes. Instead Skype, IRC, and blogs provide most of the communication a healthy, productive team needs: That’s what my team used to design and build new features and daily updates used instantly by millions of WordPress.com users.

4. Hire by trial.

There is no scientific evidence resumes and interview loops are effective methods for hiring staff. The job interview itself is dubious, since few interviews are truly skilled at doing it without bias. We use these questionable methods, because they’re familiar, and employees are biased: Since they passed those tests, they feel validated when their use is continued on others.

Instead of this mass stupidity, Automattic hires by trial. They don’t care what degree you have or what skills you list. Instead they ask candidates to do actual work on a trial basis. This takes more time, but they’ve found those willing to put in the extra time are better candidates anyway.

5. There is no innovation without experimentation.

Many people talk about wanting big ideas, but it’s rare that talk is matched with action. The grand frustration in the working world is stasis. Even if you don’t think what WordPress.com does can work for you, you must respect their willingness to experiment. The fact that they hired me, a veteran big company manager, shows their willingness to mix things up and learn from the results.

The history of all innovation makes clear it’s only through trying something new that progress happens. No one can talk their way to progress: We have to step off the stupid, but crowded, path called status quo and experience change. Isn’t that what our leaders are supposed to be paid to do? If we should demand anything from managers, and perhaps from ourselves, it’s to take the first step, and learning from WordPress.com is an easy place to start.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]

Google’s product head, Sundar Pichai, said during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that the company’s wireless network will debut in the United States in the “coming months.” Asked about the network’s features, Pichai said that it wants to “experiment” like it has with Android, and that it has carrier partners with which it’s working. [Source: TechCrunch]